Boot up: Facebook v privacy, what is Surface?, HP's 'Slatebook', eBay v AdWords, and more

Let’s be careful out there. Photograph: D. Hurst / Alamy/Alamy

A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Joshua Brustein:

For years people have been complaining that Facebook's (FB) privacy controls are too confusing, and the social network made several changes to these policies on Thursday that indicate it agrees.

For new users' first post, Facebook's default setting will be to share only with their friends. This makes sense, considering that someone who hasn't been on Facebook before is less likely to realize what kind of risks he's taking by posting private thoughts. "We recognize that it is much worse for someone to accidentally share with everyone when they actually meant to share just with friends, compared with the reverse," the company says in a statement posted on its website.

In addition, Facebook is rolling out a privacy checkup tool, which will remind people whom they are sharing with, which apps they're connected to, and what kind of information they're sharing through their profiles. Facebook users will begin seeing the checkups over the next couple of weeks.

*golf clap*

Neil Shah with some more nuggets:

• Smartphone revenues now accounts to 95% of the total handset shipment revenues globally, highest ever. Feature phones are moving towards oblivion (pretty quickly).

• Apple captured more than a third of those revenues with Samsung closely behind Apple with revenue share, together capturing more than two-third of global smartphone revenues as well
If we leave out Samsung, Apple generates more revenues than all the global smartphone brands combined

• Xiaomi is now the fifth largest smartphone brand in terms of revenues overtaking likes of Nokia, Lenovo, Motorola, Coolpad and Huawei and on track to challenge LG & Sony for the third spot confirming its volume market share gains during the quarter, thanks to its smartphone models entering the global best-sellers list during the quarter

Janko Roettgers:

The other inspiration for Osmo was Sharma's previous job. Before launching the company, he worked for seven years at Google, where some of his duties included working on Google's book scanning project. Back then, he started thinking about what else you could scan, and how you bring real objects into the virtual space.

Turns out, making this work in the real world isn't actually all that easy. Osmo has to work under variable lighting conditions, on different kinds of tables and with objects that align in countless ways. Conventional image processing doesn't work for this unless you force kids to always align their letter cards (the way I did the first time I tried it), require play on white backgrounds and impose all other kinds of unrealistic constraints.

Children play differently than adults do.

Sameer Singh:

The challenge for tablets is to move upmarket into productivity use cases without compromising on their advantages over PCs - 1) ease of use, and 2) lower price points. With the Windows 8 operating system and a price tag starting at $930 (incl. the keyboard cover), the Surface Pro 3 misses on both points.

The primary selling point of the Surface is access to legacy applications which are practically unusable without the keyboard cover (the fact that this is still sold as an optional accessory is puzzling). In other words, the Surface is not a tablet, but an ultraportable PC or "ultrabook" which happens to have a touchscreen. The product has been designed to cater to a very niche segment of enterprise users, i.e. users who have already decided to purchase a portable PC over a tablet. This leaves no room to move upmarket and no flexibility to move downmarket. The sub-par mobile app ecosystem for Windows Phone/RT limits downmarket movement as well.

The SlateBook 14 reportedly features a 14in, full HD touchscreen display, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage.

It has a microSD card slot, HDMI port, 3 USB ports, audio jack, and  802.11b/g/n WiFi, and Bluetooth. It also features Beats Audio and has a a keyboard with dedicated keys for Android functions such as Home and Recent Apps.

The notebook runs Google Android and features access to the Google Play Store, which means you should be able to access over a million Android apps.

…While the HP SlateBook 14 will hardly be the first Android laptop to his the streets, it's one of the first from a big-name PC maker since the Toshiba AC100 10 inch notebook launched in 2010

.…the fact that HP is promising access to the Google Play Store on the SlateBook 14 suggests that the company has Google's blessing to load Android on this laptop.

OK, so it was April, but this is a fascinating transcript of the podcast.

Larry Kim:

Last year, eBay published a paper on a "large-scale field experiment" they'd conducted that supposedly conclusively proved that "brand-keyword ads have no short-term benefits, and that returns from all other keywords are a fraction of conventional estimates." In short, the gist was that AdWords doesn't work for companies as big as eBay, and paid search is only marginally useful for acquiring new customers. You can read more about their findings and methodology in this summary at Harvard Business Review.

As I pointed out at the time, eBay's failure to make paid search work for them had nothing to do with AdWords and everything to do with their poorly managed campaigns and atrocious misuse of AdWords features like Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Essentially, Panda 4.0 seems to treat eBay as a content farm because it has lots of internal links.

The Information Commissioner's Office is the UK's official data protection authority:

This is a judgment that we welcome. It sets out a framework to hold data controllers operating online search engines to account for the personal data they process. It also backs our view that search engines are subject to data protection law, clarifying an area that was previously uncertain.

It's worth noting that the judgment does all this under the existing European Data Protection Directive. Some critics have previously suggested the law is no longer fit for purpose – and indeed we'd still back calls for it to be updated – but this ruling shows the existing directive can still be relevant when discussing modern data protection issues.

…as chips designed for Bitcoin mining started appearing in early 2014, demand for graphics cards has been dropping. Since mining chips have advantages in size, power consumption, reliability and costs, most Bitcoin operators have turned to dedicated chips instead, the sources said.

Bitcoin's dropping demand is also affecting overall demand for mining machines, the sources added.

With China also not seeing any significant increases in graphics card demand, global graphics shipments are expected to drop 10-20% sequentially in the second quarter, the sources estimated.

Hope nobody at the graphics cards companies was making forward plans based on the upward growth of sales last year.

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